Okay so that title is complete fiction, unless someone in the central Scotland area wants to somehow come hang out and bring me weak weed for the cost of, oh lets say FREE? No takers? Didn't think so. However, the beers part still rings... well, sorta true.
Okay I'll admit, the title is just stolen from a rad-as-fuck song, since the alchoholic beverages I picked up tonight are a selection of ales and ciders, as opposed to actual beers.
Anyway, enough fucking excuses! Here's the fucking drinks!
Gonna go with my usual (well, once...) format of reviewing 'em as I drink 'em, it usually gets pretty retarded as the night goes on. So, here goes!
I went for the 'Hooky Gold' first. It's pretty mellow, not too much of a bite to it. Smells real dry, if thats something that 'professional' beer reviewers ever mention, the smell. Yeah, real dry. Not really a whole lot to set it apart from other drinks, but it's pretty good.
Next up... well i ain't decided yet, the fridge is calling...
Henney's Still Cider it is! Going back to the olfactory aspect of booze, hooooly shit, does this smell good! I'm generally not a big fan of cider, but it's usually cheap/free, and you can drink a full crate and feel nothing. Perfect for summer days/winter nights. Anyway, I'm rambling, totally unlike me, right?
This is such a smooth cider, it's probably the best I've ever tried. Doesn't taste carbonated in any way, and it has that real good, almost sour tang to it that REAL apples have? You can almost... well, drink that good hard CRUNNNNCHCH you get when you bite into an apple. Yeah, this rules actually.
No bullshit. Third beer time. Went for the Ola Dubh next. As I've already established to my trans-ocean drinking partner, I don't speak a fucking word of my country's native tongue, except... I can't spell it, but hello, basically. Where was I goin' with that...?
Uh, this is a real ale, brewed in whisky casks. Which obviously affects the flavour, and the strength in a fuckin awesome way. It has a real satisfying effect on the ol' nose-based sense, and the taste itself is just... fucking solid. My grammatical prowess is somewhat useless in the face of such awesome... sheer tastiness! Just... go buy one of these. Fuck that, buy 5, and drink em for dinner, and thank me later. It makes time go fast and slow.
Fourth beer. Maplemoon. The name alone. Fuck. Canadian werewolvery. Incase you hadnt guessed, I've been supplementing these reviewed beers with standard Coronas with dinner, and the occasional whisky pallette-cleanser. So yeah. Pissed as fuck. But this beer... I aint even gonna SMELL IT! Just drink it! it's good. this tstes similar to other beers I've reviewd on here, kinda... organic tasting, like a real... pungence? Apparently this coutnains Myrup Saple, but ya could've fooled me, it;s pretty dry and savoury, as opposed to'woody' and sweet. It seems to have a tree on the label for a reason....? Ah. fuck it. drink it already. Done.
I know, I know, I bought five bottles, but ya know what? This is my blog, fuck you, I dont need to finish all of 'em tonight. That other cider will go down fuckin beautifully for breakfast. So yeah, I'm calling it a night at 4 beers reviews, a few more drunk, and another to look forward to tomorrow.
Bang your fucking head to this song, then fuck off and drink somethin'.
Okay, I'll be honest, the main reason I wanted to make a ceaser salad is so I could use that semi-obscure pun title. And because I think Ive listened to so much Trap Them recently, I pretty much hum their stuff in my sleep now.
Anyway, the OTHER reason I reckoned a salad would be a good idea is because, as this blog will pretty much attest to, almost everything I eat contains either enough spices to scar your throat, copious amounts of alchohol, or there is so much carcass on my plate I'm starting to feel like I'm running a farm animal mortuary.
So salad: a nice, light, fresh, healthy option for once... oh wait, I'm smothering it in thick dressing and adding 2 whole chicken breasts and fried-to-fuck bacon on top. Ah well.
This theoretically SHOULD be a short description, as it took me fuck-all time or effort to prepare, but given my propensity for rambling sidenotes and grammatical gymnastics, it'll probably be a longer, more complex and convoluted read than The Iliad.
Okay, so I already had pre-rinsed and shredded lettuce, chopped peppers, spring onions, and two pre-cooked chicken breasts, but if you don't have that stuff... well, sort it out.
The chicken only took 15 minutes in the oven, so first thing you gotta do is pop your oven on at gas mark 6, then contain your breasts.
While that's going on, get your frying pan ready for the bacon. Personally, I like my bacon burnt to a fucking cinder when it's going into a salad, give it some CRUNCH! So I fried mine for a suuuuper long time, eventually cutting it into strips/squares while it was still in the pan.
While the bacon and chicken are getting all hot n' stuff, organise your salad on your plate, using the lettuce as your base. Throw on as much 'healthy' stuff as you fancy. As ever, this is wiiide open to interpretation, put whatever the fuck you want on your plate, pineapples, camembert, dog biscuits, whatever.
During this time, you'll also want to prepare a caeser dressing, otherwise this is just gonna be a random salad with meat all over the damn place. You would think this would be the point where I'd go into great detail about exactly HOW to make the dressing. But I won't, because my pa decided to micro-manage that aspect of his own dinner, wouldn't even let me near the condiments! I seem like a pretty trustworthy, albeit amateur as hell, cook, right? Not to him, I guess.
Shut off your oven, remove the chicken, and tear, not cut, tearing it is very important. Mainly because it's just fun to rip flesh apart (oh HI, vegetarians!), and because it looks better for the purposes of food blog photography. Sprinkle your torn strips of chicken haphazardly over your salad, then do the same with your blackened bacon. Drop some croutons on top from a great height, like some sort of bread-based re-enactment of Hiroshima. Finally, let whatever obsessive, secretive weird relative prepared your dressing splash it everywhere. You want so much of it that your croutons soften up, LASHINGS of dressing!
I figure that's enough words. Here's the aftermath:
And here's the disjointed, mangled, sexy audio filth that inspired the title:
This was gonna be dinner last night, but I got... distracted. You know someone rules when they somehow manage to make you completely ignore food in favour of stayin' up all night talking to them instead. Big talk, from a guy who writes a food blog, right? Technically I could have started cooking this at 3am last night, buuut... I figure falling asleep with my face in a frying pan won't do me any good.
Anyway, enough excuses, onto the food! I've wanted to try a recipe from the Southern states of America for... well, forever. In the not-too-distant future when I decide to drop out of life in favour of travelling/eating my way around the world, the South, and specifically Louisiana, is waaaaay high on my list of desirable delicacy destinations.
So as a warm up, I decided to cook one of the best known Creole dishes: Jambalaya. There are a few different varieties of jambalaya that I won't go into, but most of them seem to involve a seafood ingredient at some stage. Not being a confident enough seafood cook, I decided to scratch this ingredient from my shopping list.
Here's what I did pick up:
Incase it's not immediately obvious, that there is a big-ass link of chorizo, as well as a 12-pack of chipolatas. Like I didn't eat enough pork in those hotdogs yesterday, right? Death by pork, it's the only way to go.
First thing you gotta do, like seemingly every other damn thing I cook, is chop your peppers/onions/tomatoes/fingers-through-sheer-vegetable-boredom into decent cubed chunks. Set that aside for now.
Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in a standard frying pan, chop your chorizo, and drop it in there. It should INSTANTLY start turning the oil this insanely sexy orange colour. Try not to get too into the orange-ness, and turn your attention to yer chipolatas. I don't know how common these are outside the UK, I'm probably way too ignorant to have any business writing a blog like this, but fuck it. Chipolatas can be replaced by standard think pork links, they're essentially the same thing anyway. Hack em up into.. let's say quarters of their original size, and throw them into your pan too. After a couple of minutes, drop in all your onion too, so it has plenty of time to soften up and absorb some of that golden oily goodness.
While that's frying away, boil up around 280 ml vegetable stock. I just used a shitty little stock cube, obviously home made stock is better, but who has the fucking time for that? Anyway, while your stock is boiling, measure out around 200g of long-grain rice, then just scatter all of that into your frying pan. The rice should instantly start to absorb a lot of the meaty oil sloshing around in there, so when it's done it's job, you want to pour in your stock, so it has something else to drink. At this point, you should probably open a beer so you have something to drink too. I'm not educated enough about the trillion different beer brands of Louisiana, but hey, that's pretty much why I wanna go there!
Anyhow, where was I? Oh, yeah. Throw in your chopped tomatoes, ENSURING to remove the 'brains', because... well, I just don't trust tomato seeds. I have my reasons.
Cover your pan with either tin foil, or if you've run out like i did, another upside-down pan. Be sure to remove your covering every coupla minutes to stir everything around, make sure the rice is getting nice and fat. Add more stock as needed.
After around 15 minutes of this, you can add your chopped red and green peppers, as well as any additional seasoning you desire. I went for a hefty sprinkling of Nandos periperi spice rub.
Give it another 5-10 minutes under your covering, then let hunger get the best of you and serve it up. One day I'm gonna move to the South and eat enough of this stuff to put me in the ground.
Now for some NOLA heavyweights whose noise is almost as thick, meaty and fucking beautiful as this recipe:
This was a pretty spur of the moment decision, fuelled by absolute starvation and a desire to eat my weight in pork.
I don't know where the hot dog originally hails from, and to be honest I'm too lazy to look into it. The use of frankfurters makes me think Germany, but hot dogs are seen as a typically American, specifically NYC thing, right? Wherever they come from, the ones I made were very English. You'll see why in the ingredients photo:
Since I was buying all my ingredients in a standard supermarket and not some specialist infinite spice and condiment market (if one exists in Scotland, or anywhere, let me know, I'm movin' in!), I had to settle for pretty standard choices in the condiment department: Colman's English mustard and English tomato sauce.
The actual process of making hotdogs is so damn easy, even my retarded ass can do it! Or not, as you'll see from the finished result photo. I bought pre-made baguette dough, as I couldn't find any buns big enough to accomodate my meat. Stop laughing, perverts.
Stick those baguettes in the oven for around 12 minutes, turning them occaisionally so they heat through and turn golden brown evenly. While you do this, you can prepare whatever additional toppings you want.
I WAS going to go for the standard tomato ketchup, mustard and fried onion, but being my usual forgetful self, somehow I completely failed to fry, or even chop, my onion. So all I had to do was stick my sausages in the microwave.
I'm usually VERY anti-microwave, I hate ready-meals for the most part, and nothing ever tastes quite... right, when cooked by just waves of radiation, as opposed to good ol' FIRE! However, sometimes it's unavoidable. Anyway, the brand of sausages I got said they only required a minute, but that didn't sound right to my neanderthal brain, so I stuck 'em in for 2, just before my baguettes had finished browning.
Remove your baguettes from the oven, and your meat from the radiation chamber. Tear open your bread, completely scalding your already ruined hands in the process, and try and somehow fit those bizarre curved radioactive pork monstrosities within them. As you can see... it's easier said than done:
For fucks sake, those look awful, right? Although, I can actually say that hotDAMN, they were pretty damn good! The one with the burnt baguette, broken dog, and condiment massacre on top was mine, my sister pretty much stole the one in the foreground that actually turned out pretty well.
Anyhow, enough of my shit, this is a quick-as-fuck snack that's cheap as hell and takes all of 15 minutes to prepare, and who doesn't like hot dogs, right?
For once I couldn't come up with even a bad music pun for a post title, but then I got to thinking about what the actual ingredients were for this little bit of alchoholic alchemy and came up with a suitably pretentious literary-inspired title instead.
Basically, all I did was make standard pancakes (or 'dropped scones' as my weird Northern 1950's bakery book calls 'em), with a couple of little twists. The main attraction for me was the syrup, but we'll get to that in a bit. First, here's the obligatory ingredients shot:
Firstly I'd like to point out that YES, Southern Comfort is ENTIRELY necessary when making pancakes, or at least when I make 'em anyway. Also, I was ill and tired as fuck when I put that shot together, so yeah, I'm missing... well a lot of the ingredients I actually used. Bite me.
The first thing you wanna do is measure out around 5 ozs (I know, ounces, what the fuck right? blame the ancient recipe book) of plain flour, and also around half an ounce of butter. If you're as fucking weird as me and you can't touch flour because for some reason it creeps you the fuck out, get someone else to knead the butter and flour together, so it all breaks up into disgusting flour-y disgustingness.
Then you want to crack a couple of eggs into a pyrex bowl, and get stirrin'! Add in the occasional splash of milk as you stir, just to thin out the consistency, unless (again) you're like me and like a reeeally thick goopy mixture.
This is the point where you can deviate from most standard recipes and get a little bit creative with ingredients. Not that I did anything batshit crazy like add crack cocaine or centipede legs, I stuck to pretty safe choices like demerara sugar, ground ginger and cinnamon. Mix your flour mixture together with your egg/milk mixture, and chuck in all your sugar or whatever. Whisk the hell outta all of that, and leave it to sit in a bowl in the fridge for about 20 minutes. I don't know why you gotta do that, but the recipe told me to.
While that's pointlessly chilling, you can get to the REAL reason this dessert is so damn fun.
First get yourself a mini-cauldron, and add in COPIOUS amounts of Southern Comfort, then pour in about the same amount of real Canadian maple syrup. Seriously, you want to make this about half and half, for maximum boozey goodness.
It might not look like a lot in the photo above, but when you're only serving one, trust me, it's more than enough! Remove your pancake mix from the fridge, and for the sheer hell of it, splash in a little more Southern Comfort, because clearly your throat doesn't hurt enough.
Fire up your frying pan on a pretty high heat, and slooowly pour in a good helping of your mixture. It should only take a minute before you start too see bubbles form, so if you're skilled enough, try and flip your pancake when you see the first bubbles. If you time it right, you'll get pancakes that are a fucking beautiful golden colour. Basically just repeat this as many times as it takes until you've used all your pancake batter, I managed to get 4 decent sized pancakes, but if you wanna make 'em even bigger, you could settle for 2 HUGE pancakes. Anyway, enough horseshit, top your stack off with a chunk of butter, and then drown em in Southern Syrup.
I'm pretty sure I'll be dead by 50, and cross-sections of my arteries will be displayed in medical texts for centuries. This is my third steak sandwich in four days. I fully intend to live up to this blog's title and eat myself to death.
Enough bullshit from me, that there's yer ingredients. The dough-y lookin things are half-baked ciabattas, these take about 8 minutes in the oven on gas mark 5, turning them occasionally so their whole surface turns that nice golden brown. While those are warming and rising, turn your attention to the frying pan. I got super-lucky today and got use of the kitchen directly after someone else had just cooked a full fry-up in the frying pan, so it still had all that lovely meaty oil left sloshing around in it. I turned the flame up and threw in my jalapenos. Fry them until they start to crisp up a little, then take 'em out and set them to one side for now. Thinly slice enough cheese to get some pretty decent coverage across however many sandwiches you'll be filling.
Look at the fucking size of that steak! I got that thing for next to nothing too, sometimes supermarkets are okay. I still prefer to buy direct from a proper butcher when I can, but my local butchers is in a pretty rough part of town, it's not fun getting 'faggot' shouted at you from across the street when all you wanna do is buy some meat.
Anyway, lower your hunk of flesh into the pan, and IMMEDIATELY start to dice it up using the biggest knife you can find. When researching the Philly cheesesteak, one other recipe I saw said you had to do it this way, and I thought surely it makes more sense to cut it either before or after the steak is cooked? I actually had a practice run on this meal due to not being able to find the damn camera the other night, and cut the steak after it had been fried, and for some reason it was just tough as all hell, and just didn't taste... right, y'know? So I gave it a shot at cutting it IN the pan and hey, whaddaya know, it works!
Your ciabattas will be done by this point so remove them from the oven, cut 'em in half, and leave them open, ready to pile your steak, jalapenos and thinly sliced cheese onto. Once thats done, stick 'em under a grill for a coupla minutes, just to get the cheese to melt into the steak. Daaaaamn that even SOUNDS good! As a final, artery-destroying touch, drizzle any excess grease left in your frying pan over the top of the whole thing.
Drive this 10" meat steak into my Glaswegian arteries.
For about a year now I've been talking to my mate Luke about the idea of having a proper chilli cook off. We spent hours discussing all the weird, wonderful, bizarre and disgusting stuff we could put into chilli, stuff that would make it so close to inedible, but we'd eat it anyway, no matter how fucking awful it turned out.
About a month ago, after I actually ventured back into society and saw him again, we decided we'd 'set the date' so to speak, and decided on 2nd October. I've spent about 3 nights since we set that date working on my chilli recipe, so I had a pretty universally lovable chilli, with none of the weird ingredients, or even the stuff that some people aren't into, such as kidney beans, red pepper, that sorta stuff. The plan was to use this as a back-up, incase I really did create something so unholy that it rotted someone's stomach lining away.
Anyway, enough bullshit. Here's the fucking epic mass of ingredients:
To feed four people, you're looking at about 1lb of minced beef there. You can also use chunks of steak, in a similar way as you would in a stew, but as you'll learn later this can be tricky to get right.
As with just about every damn thing I make for this blog, this has goddamn fucking red onions in it. I don't know why I keep doing it to myself, or why every damn dish needs onion, but I guarantee if you ever see me cook, I'll be weeping more than a teenage goth when they accidentally stab themselves in the eye with their eyeliner pencil.
So, dice up those motherfucker onions, cut up a couple of small pickled chillies, and very thinly chop your clove of garlic (consult Goodfellas for tips on that one). Set those aside, and grab your red pepper. Decapitate the top of the pepper, and scrape out the seedy innards so none remain. Then divide into sections, slice, and chop it so it has about the same consistency as your onions.
You'll see from the picture above I bought smaller chilli peppers/haloumi/bacon again, you can consult the Mummified Bacon Bomb post on what I did with those.
Once all your veg/chilli is prepared, light a flame under your casserole dish, and pour in about 2 tablespoons worth of sunflower oil. Just for the sheer fun of it, rummage your hands around in your bowl of mince while the dish pre-heats, and imagine you've just killed the animal with your bare hands, and must now skin, gut and strip the edible flesh from it's bones. Yeah, I'm a morbid cunt.
Add the mince into the dish in stages, stirring it, and breaking it up with a big-ass fork so it has a decent consistency, and isn't just a giant clump of flesh. When it has browned nicely, you should have a decent water-y beef stock in your dish. In order to keep this for cooking your veggies in, remove the mince from the casserole using a slotted spoon, and drain any excess liquid back into the dish. Once all your mince is on a side plate, dump in your onions, chillies, garlic, and let that cook, and soften for about ...7 minutes?
Boil up about 800ml of water, as you'll need this to make even more beef stock. Add in a tablespoon of plain flour: this partly determines how thick your sauce will be, so if you fancy something with the consistency of spicey tar, add in as much flour as you like. Once your stock cube has dissolved in your water, mix it in slowly using your stirring fork/spoon/spork/fpoon, and add in a small tin of tomato puree. If you don't have a tin let's say... about 2 tablespoons of puree will do it. Mix this all up for another 5-10 minutes, until it boils.
If you're weird enough, feel free to cackle, speak pidgin-Latin, and pretend you're some sort of culinary Witch/Wizard as you stir this. Yes, I'm that much of a fucking nerd.
When this has started to boil, when there are bubbles rising your cauldron, re-insert your meat. Dodgy turns of phrase aside, keep stirring for about another 5 minutes, so it all develops the same rich iron-brown consistency.
Pop your oven on at about Gas Mark 2, cover your casserole with it's heavy lid, and place it in the oven for around an hour and a half. While this is cooking, you can prepare any sort of side dishes you want to have with this. As I mentioned, I made the Bacon Bombs again: these only take about 25-30 minutes overall.
I doubt any of you will actually try this, but even if you do, I doubt you'll need to go through the next pain-in-the-fuckin'-ass steps as I did. Since for some bizarre reason, we were not having the cook off in my much larger, better equipped kitchen, I had to somehow find a way to transport all of this stuff up to Luke's for the final stages. I won't bore you with the myriad problems I encountered, and the burn marks on my hands as a result, but safe to say it was NOT an easy process.
Upon arrival at the venue for this spicey showdown, I divulged my plan of action to my cookery nemesis. I was to outdo whatever he had to throw at me by splitting my casserole into FOUR smaller bowls, and cooking four different varietys of chilli, each with different ingredients, sides and tastes, so that I would have ALL bases covered. Yeah, I know, I'm a fuckin' genius.
Here are my four varieties:
Chilli 1: The Universal Chilli
Basic chilli, taken straight from the casserole
Kidney beans
No chilli peppers
No hotsauce
Served with a side of boiled basmati rice
Bacon Bombs on the side too
Chilli 2: Nasty Nacho Chilli
Basic chilli
Add minimal amount of kidney beans
Add ONE variety of hotsauce, for extra bite
Small amount of chopped chilli peppers (seeds removed)
Served with tortilla chips, sour cream, grated cheese and guacamole
Chilli 3: Ch-Ch-Chilli
Chilli
Chocolate
Cherries
Chilli 4: Nuclear-strength,oesophagus-scarring, colon-rotting CHILLI CON CARNAGE!
Basic chilli
Add in a tub of extra chopped red pepper
Add a chopped chilli, with seeds intact
Add in lashings of 4 different varieties of hotsauce: Louisiana, Tabasco, Nandos HOT Peri Peri and Dave's Inanity Sauce. Yeah.
Serve with a warm cerveza, because water is for fuckin' pussies
Incase you're not as hip to hotsauce as I am, may I present:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave%27s_Insanity_Sauce
Basically, using these four weapons of choice, I fucking annhilated the competition. Not that there was much.
Luke had decided to go for the rather bizarre combination of using beef steak chunks, and instead of beef stock, he used a pint of Dark Chocolate Stout beer, by Brooklyn Brewery. He also slow-cooked it the night before, for far too long, as he thought that would tenderise the beef? The boy ain't right.
His own sister charmingly described his chilli as looking like 'when you take a shit when you're hungover'. So ladylike. But yeah, it really did:
As much as I enjoyed making all of this stuff, and as amazing as it all tasted (no ego, it seriously was damn good!), it was kinda spoiled by the fact that only 2 other guys showed up, and they had both eaten already, despite the fact they knew we were cooking for them.
I also got called gay for having a food blog. The great Steve Hughes says it better than I ever could:
This entry in the book was contributed by the absolute LEGEND that is Bobby Liebling from the mighty fuckin' PENTAGRAM!
I don't care if you don't take anything away from this entry food-wise, but please check out Pentagram, doom pioneers and still going strong!
So, this is probably VERY different to anything I've ever cooked in the past. The only reason I chose it is because I was cooking for my family, and they're all fussy as fuck, and this was the only thing they could all agree on. It's a dish made using both rice and noodles, two things I usually cannot STAND, because they just seem like fatty lumps of tastelessness designed solely to provide cheap sustenance with no real nutritional value or taste.
However, I'm willing to give anything a shot. Here are the ingredients you'll need for this bizarre carbohydrate-packed meal:
You're looking at around 500g of chicken breast, and that white bowl is actually filled with crushed up cornflakes (yeah I know, what the fuck Bobby, right?).
The first step I took was to get out my casserole dish, and smear the entire inside of it with full-fat butter. Once that's done, you can start cooking your various ingredients one-by-one.
First up is the chicken. Arrange all 500g worth on a baking tray, and stick it a pre-heated oven at around gas mark 5. It should take around 20-25 minutes to cook through.
While that's going, slice up your red onion into rings, or you can take it further and dice them, but due to the severe weeping involved with chopping onions, I try to take as little time with them as possible. Fire up your frying pan, and fry the shit out of the onions til they're nice and oily/burnt, then remove them and leave them aside for now.
Boil up a pot of water, and dump in your entire bag of rice. If you're like me, you'll probably only use around half of it, but what the fuck, it costs nothing, just use it all. Once your rice has been boiling for around 10 minutes, quickly remove and strain it, and put that aside too.
Refill your pot with water, re-boil, then dump in your noodles for about 4 minutes. Once the onion, rice and noodles are taken care of, your chicken should be about good to go.
Remove the chicken breasts from the oven, and leave them to cool for a minute or two. Here comes the fun part: tearing apart the flesh of an animal with your bare hands!
Grab the chicken and start ripping it up frantically, so that no strip is the same size. Tear at it like you're filled with murderous rage, like it's the face of everyone who's ever wronged you. Who says cooking isn't therapeutic?
Once your chicken lies in a ravaged heap, flesh clinging to your hands, bring over your casserole dish, and start to add in everything you've prepared so far.
Add it all in stages, so you're getting a good ratio of rice:noodle:chicken:onion. As you do this, splash in some cream of mushroom soup, this might seem fucking weird and gross, but it's pretty necessary to ensure that this doesn't just become a dry, tasteless mess. Once it's all in the casserole, give it a good mix around, preferably using your hands. Close your eyes and feel all those disgusting textures swirl between your fingers. Yeah, I'm a fucking creepy weirdo, what's the problem?
Sprinkle your cornflakes, and any sort of condiments you desire on top of this whole mess. I went for soy sauce, to follow the recipe as close as possible, but maybe go for something with a bit more flavour?
Pop the lid on your dish, and stick this in the oven at (my favourite!) gas mark 5. Give it maybe.... 40 minutes, 50 at a push. Remove the lid 15 minutes before the end so the top layer crisps up nicely, gives it a bit of BITE!
I made enough to serve 4 people if they're REALLY hungry, but this could easily stretch to serve 6 when combined with a starter. I wasn't expecting it to be as tastey as it turned out, I think the mushroom soup and chicken strips helped to liven up the boring-ass rice/noodles combo. I probably wouldn't make this again though, it took me waaaay too long, for very little taste payoff.
A couple of weeks ago I was aimlessly wandering around Waterstones, drooling over their cookery section, when I caught sight of what I can only refer to as some sort of bible. I audibly gasped, and through the haze of excitement I discerned the name of this mighty tome: 'Hellbent For Cooking: The Heavy Metal Cookbook'.
I knew I had to possess this gastronomic grimoire no matter what, so with shaking hands and sweating palms, I handed over the book to the cashier, and prayed to the man downstairs that I'd have enough coins in my pocket to purchase this thing of beauty. I got financially lucky, for once, and came home with the book in my clammy grasp, aching to try out every recipe immediately. Somehow it's taken me until now to actually get around to it.
This will be the first of two posts, as I cooked two recipes in one evening, in an attempt to make up for lost time, and I decided to go for recipes by two bands I really fucking love.
The starters were inspired by AUTOPSY mainman Chris Reifert's contribution to the book.
Due to my inability to find a decent deli in the whole of central Glasgow (even venturing into the shitty affluent hipster/student areas yielded no luck!), the ingredients have changed a fair bit from his original concept. Here is what I managed to find in the shitty supermarkets:
In the original recipe it was jalapenos instead of regular chilli peppers, and Monterey Jack cheese instead of haloumi, but hey, those are some pretty good substitutes.
First things first, buy that album, because you're going to need it as your soundtrack for cooking this stuff.
Secondly, you want to remove the stalks, and the seeds from those chillies, because even I can't handly that much spiceyness. Slit your chillies length-ways, and just scrape out the insides with a spoon/knife. Set those aside for a moment, and open up your haloumi.
For anyone who hasn't tried this cheese before, be prepared for it to taste NOTHING like cheese. It has a texture more akin to chicken, except it's entirely dairy. It's this texture which makes it fucking EXCELLENT on a BBQ, or just to grill in general.
So slice and dice the whole block into a size that you think would fit well within your chillies/jalapenos, and arrange it on a baking tray, and pop it under your grill for... lets say 10 minutes, why not.
Once you have your grilled haloumi nice and golden brown, stuff it into the corpses of the chillies. For embalming fluid, I chose to use spreadable 'smoked' cheese. Take a butter knife and just wedge as much of the cream cheese into every available gap not filled by the haloumi, until it's seeping out of the cavity in your chillies.
Next you want to bring in the bacon. I went for streaky (FINALLY FOUND SOME!), but any kind is good I guess. Cut it into nice manageable strips, and twist it around your entire pepper/cheese things, making sure it completely envelopes them so no innards are spilled. Impale these with toothpicks to hold it all together, arrange them on a foil-covered baking tray, and stick them in your oven at gas mark 5.
In around 20 minutes they should have cooked through, and started to even crisp up the bacon a little. Unfortunately I didn't have time to wait around for that to happen as I was cooking for mi familia, and they have no love for crispy bacon. Serve on a bed of lettuce with bbq dressing. I didn't, because I forgot to buy any, but hey, you live and learn, right?
Everything about it, from every single purveyor of the stuff (except Taco Bell, but you don't get that over here anyway). The whole process of walking into the fluorescent box, surrounded by overweight spotty drones, squinting at the tiny text behind someone's head for 5 minutes, trying to work out which option is least likely to give you the shits. Then trying in vain to explain what you want, to the point of using sign language because the overweight spotty drone behind the counter sure as fuck doesn't speak English past the phrase 'next over here, please'. Within 30 seconds, your pre-made 'meal' is being handed to you shrink wrapped in glossy paper and cardboard, and your drink that is pretty much just flavoured ice is spewed out of the giant gurgling robot on the counter. You sit down at the crappy formica booth, trying not to vomit at the sound of all the other pigs snuffling away in their troughs, and attempt to force this (barely edible) cardboard nightmare down your gullet without the aid of any cutlery whatsoever. Now, to me, that sounds like fucking hell. I'd rather starve to death than eat M*******'s.
Safe to say, when I want a decent burger and fries, the process is anything but 'fast'. Occaisionally I get a craving for one so strong it upsets me, because there are NO decent burger places this side of Glasgow, so I usually end up just not eating. Today I actually stood up and audibly said "Fuck this!" and ran out the door with burgs on the brain, much to the surprise of my family.
Here are the ingredients I picked up:
You can pretty much see from the picture the list of ingredients, but the amount of minced beef there is about 1lb, and that makes enough burgs for two.
As usual, the first thing you want to do is slice, dice, dismember, disembowel, sever and generally destroy your vegetables.
Dice your red onions into the tiniest squares imaginable, and sprinkle them through your mince. Add salt, pepper and chilli flakes to taste, and mix it all up using your hands (shout out to Steff: MEAT MANICURES!). Set that aside for now, and get into those potatoes. Slice them into... let's say 8ths, so that they're more wedges than chips, really. Place those into a basin of water for about 10 minutes.
Now you can get back to the fun of playing with carcass! Yay! Grab a handful of your mince mixture, and round it off and pat it into a vaguely burgerly shape, really squash it together so it's good n' dense. You should get 4 pretty decent sized burgers out of that amount of mince.
Empty your potatoes out of the basin, and into a tea towl to dry them off a bit. Fire up your deep fat fryer, and fill it with oil to about halfway full. Once your tatties are dry and your oil is hissing, dump them into the wire basket, and slowly lower them in. You can basically just leave them alone for 10 minutes while they crisp up, and concentrate on your meat.
Get your burgers into a frying pan, and throw in a couple of slices of (preferably streaky) bacon if you have any space left. You're looking at maybe 3.5 minutes per side for the burgers, but don't take my word for it, always cut the biggest burg in half and make sure they're cooked through.
While that's all just cooking away, slice your cheese (I went for Canadian extra mature, mmm pungent!) along the long side, if that makes any sense? Basically the way that will give you a biiig surface area of cheese. If you're of a healthy disposition, rustle up a basic side salad, and get all your other toppings and condiments ready. When your chips are a beautiful golden brown, and your burgs and bacon are a crisp, meaty pile of deliciousness, well then you're done ain't ya? Put it all together and serve with a non-alchoholic beverage, because you're feeling pretty tender after last nights ridiculous intake of beers.
Ok, contrary to how I condusted my last beer reeeivew, I'm actually typing this after consuming all 4 beers, instead of as I go long. I've just noticed that my spelling has gone to shit, fuck it. I'll leave it in for comedic value.
This is kind of a cheating review, as I've actually had a couple of these brands before, some in great quantities, some in very few. but fuck it, I like em, why the fuck shouldn't I review em?
So, here are my four choices for the evening:
People slag Corona off for being a 'girls beer' or whatever bullshit, but if you can find me a smoother beer to chug down while you eat, I tip my hat to you sir. That shit's like water, it goes down so well. people put a wedge of lime in the neck, but who the fuck actually has the time to be cuttin' up limes at home? pfft, fuck off. so yeah, chugged that down in about 5 minutes out of sheer thirst.
Second beer of the evening: Zeitgeist. As far as I know, this is a local concoction. only reason I know of it;s existence is because I've been to a few parties with the girl who designed the label. Always fun to geek out over booze and illustration with someone. so yeah, I've been promising to try this shit for over a year now, just never got around to it. It has kind of aaaaa... funky taste? like a brand of sweets I never got into, or something. either way, I'm glad this shit isn't sold in bars, I sure as fuck wouldn't oirder it.
3rd beer: Nawlins Dixie Brew. This was by far the most... delicious brew I've tasted in a long-ass time. just a really satisfying, savoury, substantial beer. i could happily demolish a 6 pack of these and feel like I'd just eaten a full meal. In fact, I pretty much might do that tomorrow night. Goddamn, back to the beer. this was a good one. look at the picture, then go try and find a bottle for yourself, then thank me.
Last beer of the evening (HA! yeah, right): Samuel Adams. I first tried this little over a year ago when i ende up in a Boston-themed boozer over in the US of A, and kinda fell in love. well, what actually happened was I got drunk as all hell & had to be 'escorted outside', but that's besides the point. Basically, this is a reeeally smooth, slightly funky beer that's incredibly 'more-ish', and reminds me of excellent times with my best friends. so yeah, deliciousness combined with nostalgia is definitely a winning combination!
so there's how I spent my friday night, chugging down brews on my own, laughng at terrible movies and wishign i had better friends to drink with. Now go get fucked up, you cunt.
So I had the idea for the title of this meal long before I acually had any idea what to put in it, except for the eponymous mushrooms of course. It was between 'Enshroomed' and 'To imbibe, cook straight and lose a tooth', and the latter is perhaps a little too specific to me alone.
I figured I could pull my usual trick of loading it up with beef, spices and cheese, but then I figured why not make it a bit interesting and use... oh, I don't know, sheep lungs, beef heart, and various other grisly ingredients? Or as most, less morbidly inclined, people call it, Haggis.
So with that idea fully formed in my mind, all I had to do was get the time to actually make the fucking thing. I had originally planned to just use 1 or 2 giant portobello mushrooms, but by the time I eventually got off work and got to the only supermarket open at that time, they had somehow sold out of giant fuckin' mushrooms, DAMNIT! So this recipe was made under extremely compromised conditions, and I apologize for that, it should have been so much better.
My plans for the other ingredients were pretty rough, except that I wanted it to look like a delicious death metal album cover when I was done. So I picked up some good strong red cheddar, some ground peri peri spices, a bottle of Louisiana hotsauce, and for some reason I decided that red food colouring would be a good idea. It wasn't.
So, to start this off, you have to choose your weapon of choice when it comes to cooking your haggis. You basically have 3 options:
The quick option, 5 minutes in a bowl in the microwave.
The medium, and probably optimal option, boiling it on the stove in the skin for around 45 minutes.
The sloooooow tedious option, 90 minutes (!) in the oven, on Gas Mark 5, or whatever the equivalents are.
I went for the slow, doomy option, as always. I needed time to shower as I hadn't felt human in days and I had started to suspect there was a small eco-system living in my hair. Also, it gives you time to throw on some music while you prepare all your other ingredients. Obviously, you should go for Entombed while making this meal, but any death metal will suffice. Wrap your haggis, still in it's skin, in a good amount of tin foil, and stick it on a baking tray with a slight covering of water in it, and shove it into the fire.
So while you're torturing your mushrooms with a big fuckin' knife, removing their stalks and all that... whatever they call that weird-black-shit-inside-mushrooms, your haggis should maybe be around the 80 minute mark.
Pop the disembowled mushrooms on a baking tray, and don't be an idiot and forget you hate oil and accidentally add some like I did. urrrgh. Put those in your oven besides the haggis for around 5-10 minutes.
While those are hopefully sweating out all that gross mushroom-y liquid, take this time to grate up a pretty good amount of cheese, and to gut some red chillies. Don't, whatever you do, decide to make it look good by splashing red food colouring all over your plate like blood spatter patterns, as that stuff tastes NASTY!
Always put taste over presentation, but if you can have some fun with it without sacrificing taste, go for it!
Remove both the mushroom tray and the haggis tray from your oven, and switch on your grill immediately. Your mushrooms should hopefully have 'baked' so they're nice, crispy and dried out. This wasn't the case with mine, but I blame the fact they were just shitty normal-sized mushrooms, not ones of the magnitude that they have an atomic blast named after 'em.
Slit open the skin of the haggis, and dig around inside until you've turned that fucker inside out, scraping out every last disgusting morsel. Cram in as much of the haggis as you can into your mushroom(s), really pack it in.
Finally sprinkle on some of that strong-ass cheddar, splash in some hotsauce, and impale your chilli peppers on toothpicks, then stab 'em all the way into the mushroom, so it looks like some kind of delicious weird voodoo doll. Stick this under the grill for 3-4 minutes, just enough to char your cocktail sticks and melt your cheese.
Finally, serve with a glass of milk, coz this stuff is SERIOUSLY spicey!
Let me preface this post by saying that it won't live up to the standards set by that title, because I ballsed up the 'towering' part by failing to construct the snack properly. Apologies all round.
So anyway, this is a fast-as-fuck snack that everyone on the planet should be well versed in: the classic grilled cheese sandwich.
However, I put my own spin on it by adding, you guessed it, meat and spicey stuff. Here's what I used:
3 slices of thick-cut white bread (yeah, having 3 is important)
4 slices of thick-cut cheddar cheese, and a couple of leftover slivers of Mexicana
4 slices of thick-cut tinned ham (if you can get past the disgusting jelly shit around it, this stuff is KING!)
Any spicey sauce with a thick, ketchup-like consistency.
You can see in that photo the impetus for my lunch decision today. I was flicking through an old issue of Inked and saw that godly photograph, and I almost drowned in my own drool.
The article, incase you can't read it, is about a place called Melt Bar & Grilled (http://www.meltbarandgrilled.com/) which offers a lifetime discount for anyone who gets tattooed with their logo. Obviously, I think this THE COOLEST FUCKING THING EVER, but since I don't live in Cleveland, I can only dream...
So anyway, what you want to do first is very lightly toast your 3 slices of bread. I'm talking just introducing them to the toaster, don't let things go to far, not even to the flirting stage, and definitely no heavy petting. Just enough to lightly crisp them, but you should still be able to FOLD the bread without it breaking up.
Take your FIRST slice, apply your hotsauce to one half of it, then your first slices of ham and cheese to that same half, then lay another SECOND slice of bread on top, only half-covering your first slice. Repeat the sauce-ham-cheese procedure on the half of your second slice which covers the first slice.
Is it making sense so far? Ah, fuck it.
Fold over your FIRST slice into the sandwich, so that it covers your second layer of sauce-ham-cheese. Then you add in your THIRD slice of bread. This is where I fucked it up royally. Blame it on my lack of coffee, whatever, but the photo that follows will not look like what I'm describing.
Add your 3rd layer of sauce-ham-cheese onto your THIRD slice of bread, then fold in your SECOND slice of bread on top of that. One final layer of sauce-ham-cheese, and you fold over your third slice of bread to close it up. Yeah, this might not be as easy to do as I initially predicted. Which is why I did it wrong myself, then flew into a howling, weeping, inconsolable rage when I realised I had failed.
Basically, with any luck it should end up as a giant, heaving, oozing mess of sauce, cheese and meat, which is why you gotta keep it together with toothpicks. Fire up your grill, and stick it under. If this sandwich (made correctly) doesn't catch on fire and erupt with cheese and sauce like a volcano, then you've done it wrong.
Serve with a cup of very strong coffee, because after this is eaten, you've gotta go get your shit together and see your bank manager. Fuck the bank.
Sooo, I guess I take requests now! That's a fucking dare by the way, my stomach is fucking IRONCLAD!
This little gem was suggested by my fellow everything-hater, brother-from-a-transatlantic-mother @hhhhogan. That's his twitter username by the way, I'm not just drunk again, so do the right thing and follow his ass.
Anyway, the ingredients and process behind his suggestion were mega simple: get an apple, cut it's heart out, replace with peanut butter.
Being the awkward bastard that I am, I thought this might be too simple to warrant a whole post about it. To ramp things up, and include concessions to my own obsessions (yeah, wordplay, ya like that?), I got slicing n' dicing, and added liberal coatings of muscavado sugar and chilli flakes, and stuck it under the grill for a coupla minutes. It didn't really do anything to caramelise the sugar, so I just called it quits and got started.
I gotta say, this was a lot better than I expected it to be. I'm not a peanut butter fan AT ALL, so it was unexpected that this actually didn't ruin my night. It kind of goes together in the same weird way that grapes go with cheese n' crackers, y'know? Or like, cranberrys on ham. Is that even a thing or have I made it up?
Anyhow, I'd definitely recommend trying this out, the whole snack only cost me £1, so what ya waiting for?
I'm willing to wager that one of the things Britain, and specifically Scotland is most (in)famous for is our fried breakfasts. Our heroic intake of fried meats with most meals is probably the reason that around 2/3rds of our population is overweight, and that we apparently have the 2nd-highest obesity levels in the developed world. Way to go, guys, at least we're world-class at something!
All of this doesn't change the fact that I'm a massive fan of the morning fry up, but since I work I usually don't have the time to devote to an epic breakfast each day, which is probably why I'm a rare beast in Scotland: the lesser-spotted skinny bastard.
So with a rare morning free, I decided to put some serious work in to develop a weapons-grade fry up.
The list of ingredients is perhaps a little harder to get together if you don't live in central Scotland, but don't worry, most of these are universal:
2 rashers of bacon (you can choose from the many different bacon types based on personal preference)
2 slices of lorne sausage (this is one of those things you can only really get here)
2 link sausages
2 free-range eggs (have a heart: give animals a good life before you slaughter and eat them. it's only right.)
2 slices of black pudding (this may be another item that's slightly harder to track down)
A few slices of potato scone (I made my own, but can't be fucking bothered explaining how I did it)
Condiments (I went for the classic Heinz Ketchup and HP Sauce)
There are a few things you can chop n' change in terms of basic ingredients. Here's some things I didn't go for because it would have meant less MEAT PRODUCTSSS!
Toast with full-fat butter
Baked beans
A tomato
Sliced mushrooms
So once you've gotten all that together, pop the kettle on, get a flame going under your oiled up frying pan, and stick some greasy music on for a soundtrack.
Unless you life in some fancy-schmancy mansion that has 2 frying pans, you're gonna need to do this in stages. So first priority is your 2 types of sausages, stick 'em in the pan, and what the hell, chuck in the black pudding too. Give this stuff maybe 3-4 minutes on each side (yeah, try finding the 'side' of a link sausage!). Also, try not to get distracted air-drumming to Iron Monkey so that your lorne sausage starts to burn and sets off your smoke alarm. I'm a fucking jackass.
Once it's all cooked, transfer it onto a plate, shove it in your oven at the LOWEST setting, just to keep it warm. Next you want to do the potato scone. this only takes a few minutes either side, just enough time to make it good n' crunchy. Once it's reached that stage, take it out, stick it on your oven plate.
Now lay down your bacon, and crack in your eggs. I'm a fan of almost-raw bacon, nothing crispy, and I like my eggs sunny side up, because for some reason the colour yellow makes me grin like a goon.
So if you're making me breakfast, there ya go, but if you have any other preference then...
A) What the fuck is wrong with you?
B) Fine, fry it to your own taste, weirdo.
Get your plate out of the oven, but don't burn your hands like I did. Heap it all up, then add your chosen condiments and garnishes, serve with a glass of OJ and the biggest mug of tea you can find.
DISCLAIMER: I have never, and never intend to have any children, therefore that mug isn't entirely accurate, but it was the biggest I could find.
I am either the best or the worst person to go food shopping with. I'm like the hyperactive, sugar-ridden child who walks along every aisle screaming "MUUUUUM, CANWEGETTHISCEREALLOOKITHASADRACULAONIT!!!", except I am like this with EVERYTHING!
Go to the spice aisle, I'll get over-excited and pick up like 5 jars of things you've never heard of it and proclaim them to be the best thing ever.
Go to the dairy aisle and I'll pick up like 16 different types of spreadable cheese that I'm guaranteed to eat right outta the tub.
Go to the booze aisle, or any decent liquor store, and I am the definition of Kid In A Candy Shop. Apart from vodka and sambuca, I will drink ANYTHING, especially if someone else is buying/driving me home.
So it was with this in mind that today I figured I should expand my favourite drinks repertoire even further, and buy a few different beers I'd never tried before, or if I had, I was too drunk to remember trying. I settled on these four sexy specimens:
Bacchus Cherry beer: the most expensive, yet the smallest of the 4, I have high hopes for this as it's wrapped in paper. yeah, my criteria are that weird.
Budvar 'Czech Original Budweiser': I got this as I'd seen it around at venues and pubs, but never asked for it incase they gave me ordinary Budweiser, which I fucking hate with a passion. Can't be worse than American Bud, that's for sure.
Asahi 'Super Dry' Japanese beer: I chose this based on my massive beerboner for other Oriental boozes such as Tiger beer and Tsing Tao, I figured if it's even half as good as those then I'm in for a treat.
Crabbie's Alchoholic Ginger Beer: I'd first heard of this due to the TV ad featuring some '50s housewife-style stone-cold fox. Ever since I saw that and calmed myself down, I've been dying to neck on of these beauties. I freakin' love ginger beer.
For the purposes of amusing blogging, I'll type out my reviews as I drink each beer, and with any luck I'll get progressively less coherent, and progressively more riled up and beer-crazy.
First up, the Asahi.
This is a pretty smooth beer, it's going down incredibly easy since I warmed up my drinking muscles with a Corona with dinner. It's real smooth, but the word zesty keeps springing to mind, so I guess it's 'zesty' too. Really light, in the way that you could imagine gettin a 6-pack of these 500ml badboys and having a damn good night as a result. Not in any way bitter, or overly 'european' tasting. this would RULE accompanying a meal.
Next up is the Crabbies.
Wow, this went down like a sack of potatoes. I seriously rattled through this in under 10 minutes, and I'm reasonably sure it's a 500ml-er as well. tastes just like regular ginger beer, except with a weird aroma, maybe? like it reminds me of something but fuck knows what. I could easily drink a few of these in work and no-one would notice. n fact, fuck it, that's what I'll do when i go back, as an experiment. I have a major sweet-tooth, as anyone who actually knows me can attest to. I'm guessing the reason I keep having to go in for fillings and tooth removals is because I put away about 3 cans of (non-alchoholic) ginger beer a day. you can FEEL that shit rotting your enamal. but goddamn do I love it.
3rd up, the Budvar.
this comes in a green glass bottle, which worries me. I fucking hate booze outta a green bottle. I have my reasons. on first sip, it's easily the most beer-y beer of the night. like, it has much more of a TANG to it, more of a slightly yeasty sour kick. or something, I know nothing about the technicalities of beer. strangely, it's going down easier than any beer from a green bottle has any right to. this pisses me the fuck off. i WANT to hate this beer, but I just can't bring myself to it. it's from the czech republic, which makes me soften to it, because I wanna hang in prague like nothin else, and this beer might be a good... thing. these bottles are all 500ml. fuck.
final boss! Bacchus, you motherfucker.
ok, by now I'm preeeeetty pretty buzzed. not drunk, by any stretch of the imagination (although it did take some fuckineffort to type imagination), but nicely buzzed.
usually, at this point in my blood-alchohol level I'll call up a friend to take me into the city so I can play roullette and poker (badly) til 7am. but not tonight, because there's fuckin work to do, goddamnit. the world needs to know how sweet these beers are, and by god, I'm gonna tell em. you motherfuckers, keeping me a way from my gambling habit.
uh, right, so, the beer! I'm on the firsst sip, and I already feel the same way you do when you're in love, or you just really wanna get laid. I can say with confidence that this bottle is gonna rule, despite being the smalllest of the lot. glug. I can imagine lying in a grassy park, slugging down a few of these beautys and shouting abuse at families. shit. this is a beautiful beer. I kinda don;t want it to end. because I have no more booze in my house, except for some sewrious fuckin bourbon, and I don;t think I'll survive another night. if I have international readers, you better hope and pray that your nearest liqquor store in whatever-the-fuck-country stocks BACCHUS CHERRY BEER, because it's beautiful. like an alchoholic dessert. mmmmm.
oh yeah, here's that ad that gives me a serious chub:
As anyone with half a brain already knows, nachos are the ultimate in snackage. They're like Manowar, any other snacks are just false and weak in comparison.
So with this in mind, I decided to have a go at preparing the ultimate topping for my tortilla chips from scratch: homemade salsa with mexicana cheese and hotsauce.
Ingredients (to serve 2 hungry heshers):
2 decent sized red tomatoes
1 red onion (half of it should be enough)
1 clove of garlic (or more if you don't give a fuck about your breath)
1 red chilli (or yellow. either way, leave the seeds in unless you're some sort of pussy)
1 bag of cheap shitty tortilla chips (fuck Doritos)
about half a block of 'Mexicana' cheese (or standard cheddar if your market/deli isn't as awesome as mine)
Your own choice of hot sauce. Tonight I went for Nandos Peri Peri Hot, but there are a trillion excellent options.
Small tubs of sour cream and guacamole for dippage.
Once you have all your ingredients assembled in the above fashion, complete with big fuckin' knife, it's time to SHRED your ingredients, into the appropriate sizes.
Slice and dice your tomatoes into pretty small chunks, then chuck 'em in a seperate dish for now. Now slice your onions into rings, or just cut them up whatever way you feel like if you screw up the rings like I did. Throw the chopped onions into the dish with your tomatoes, and get started on the chilli. I used a pretty small/thin chilli tonight, but you can make up for this by having some cojones and leaving most of the seeds attached. Slice the chilli up, and add it to the tomatoes and onions.
Set that dish aside for a minute, and unwrap that chunk of yellow heaven known as cheese. cut about half of it off the block, and grate it up. Once that's done, get your grill on. Some people put it in the oven, but fuck that, I'm a grill man.
Arrange your tortilla chips on a plate or platter in an artistic fashion, grab handfuls of salsa and load it on top of the chips til you have a decent level of coverage, then handfuls of grated cheese on top of your salsa. Grab your weapon of choice from the hotsauce rack, and splash it absolutely everywhere, the spicier the better (words to live life by). Crack some peppercorns and grated chilli flakes over the mess you've created, and slide it under your grill.
Most of the time I like my food as raw as possible, but since there's no meat in nachos, leave it under the flames until you can HEAR it cooking, and the cheese is bubbling like a volcano.
Remove, gaze on the beast you've created, then serve with a brew from down Mexico way. My own personal preference would be Modelo but it's hard to track down, so if you gotta settle for Corona, then so be it.
